is a hint of a romance between Lushington and one of Gaskell’s daughters which led her mother to write, “Cousin V’s attentions to FE [Florence Emily]” were “very morbid.”37 After his marriage to Jane Mowatt in 1865, Lushington wrote to his wife from Manchester to tell her that he had met Elizabeth’s husband William and some of the daughters including Florence Emily who, by then was married to Charles Crompton. Lushington wrote, “I ventured to tell her that I had married you—I felt sorry that I had given the Norman Cross to her.”38 Whatever the “Norman Cross” was, or whatever it represented, it seems to have been considered a rather personal gift of the sort that might have indicated a close relationship.
Other visitors to Ockham Park when Lushington was still living at home were William Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, and William Holman Hunt. Lushington’s friendship with these and others in the Pre-Raphaelite circle will be considered in Chapter 12.
Unlike a number of Victorian offspring, Lushington retained a good relationship with his father who, with his liberal and latitudinarian views on religious matters, allowed his children a good measure of freedom in their early years that was not always found in families. His father’s beliefs and sympathies allowed his children to think unconventionally. Thus, it was that seeds were sown which prepared Lushington for his involvement with the Christian Socialists at Cambridge before he abandoned any lingering orthodox religious faith to take up the Positivism of Auguste Comte.
NOTES
1. From a letter to the author from John Montgomery-Massingberd dated July 16 1981. See also Montgmery-Massingberd's Happy Days at Gunby: A Musical Memoir (The National Trust, 1996).
2. William Michael Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti (C Scriber’s Sons, 1906), Vol. 1, p. 268.
3. Edward Lear wrote to William Holman Hunt in 1865, “but G[odfrey] & V[ernon] have grown up dreadfully alike that I can’t distinguish them a bit.” Augustus Hare, in his autobiography Peculiar People: The Story of My Life, wrote that the brothers were so alike that “it would have been impossible to know them apart, if Vernon had not, fortunately for their friends, shot off some of his fingers.” Sir Edward Clarke, in a paper to the Working Men’s College (1913), also noted that the brothers were “so much alike that if you met one of them you had to shake hands before you knew whether he was the brother who had lost his finger.” Jane Welsh Carlyle was another who commented on Vernon’s missing fingers. An undated letter from Emily Currie of West Horsley Place to Alice Lushington refers to this accident. She writes, “The keeper seems to say he had a very narrow escape, as had the Gun been leaning the other way it is almost impossible his head would not have escaped.” SHC7854/2/2/11.
4. Frances Carr to William and Anna Carr, May 1833. Carr family documents and letters, YUL, Box 2, Folder 9.
5. Frances Carr spent her last years at the Grange, Byfleet Road, Cobham. She is buried at Byfleet, Surrey.
6. Edward Peel, Cheam School From 1645 (Thornhill Press, 1974), p. 135.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Vernon Lushington to Susan Lushington, May 1890. SHC7854/11/3.
10. Vernon Lushington to Godfrey Lushington, September 21. n.y. SHC7854/12/24.
11. 17 August 1846. SHC7854/2/1/20.
12. Vernon Lushington to Susan Lushington, October 18, 1899. SHC 7854/4/2/98.
13. Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream, p. 70.
14. Stephen Lushington to Frances Lushington, December 7, 1849. SHC 7854/1/7/5. Captain Gambier was Robert Fitzgerald Gambier (1803–1885), son of Sir James Gambier. Robert Gambier married Stephen’s niece Hester Butler of Bury Lodge, Hambledon, Hampshire.
15. TNA ADM/508, Cut 34.23 and TNA ADM 196/36.
16. “Obituary of Vernon Lushington,” The Working Men’s College Journal XII, no. 223 (March 1912).
17. Vernon Lushington to Jane Lushington. SHC7854/3/7/27. Lushington’s naval record reveals that, in November 1847, he was engaged in an attack on the Arab defences in Mozambique.
18. Noel Annan refers to the Conybeare family in “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” pp. 243–86.
19. Edinburgh Review, October 1853, p. 342.
20. Letter from William Conybeare dated July 12 1850 filed with the Petition of Vernon Lushington to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. Records of the East India College, Haileybury. BL: Asian and African Studies.
21. One of Lushington’s contemporaries at Haileybury, with whom he retained a lifelong friendship, was William (later Sir William) Herschel, a grandson of the noted astronomer. Herschel’s father had been a friend of Joanna Baillie and probably knew Stephen and Sarah Lushington.
22. John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian, ed. C.H. Cooke (Chatto & Windus, 1961), p. 63.
23. 13 January 1852. SHC 7854/1/13.
24. The Haileybury Observer (1852), p. xii.
25. Edward Lear Diary, 15 July 1860. Houghton Library, Harvard Library, Harvard University. MS Eng 797.30.
26. Edward Lear Diary, October 1, 1864.
27. Edward Lear Diary, July 15, 1860.
28. Charles Buxton Diary, October 18, 1856. British Library Add MS 87175.
29. Elizabeth Gaskell to Catherine Winkworth, July 23, 1862. Chapple and Pollard, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. For more on Gaskell and the Carrs see Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell. The Early Years.
30. Elizabeth Gaskell to Marianne Gaskell, June 1853. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell.
31. Elizabeth Gaskell to Henry Arthur Bright, April 12, 1862. Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds., John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester Unversity Press, 2000.
32. Elizabeth Gaskell to George Smith, April 5, 1860. Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 162.
33. Meta Gaskell to Effie Wedgwood, November 7, 1862. Irene Wiltshire (ed.) Letters of Mrs Gaskell’s Daughters: 1856–1914 (HEB Humanities Ebooks, 2012).
34. A letter from Meta Gaskell to Charles Eliot Norton, January 30, [1867] refers to Waterhouse staying with the Gaskells at their house in Plymouth Road, Manchester.
35. The Manchester Assize Courts were partially destroyed by bombing in World War II and subsequently demolished.
36. Vernon Lushington to Jane Lushington, February 23, 1865. SHC7854/3/5/11.
37. Elizabeth Gaskell to Mariane Gaskell [May 1 and 2, 1862], Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 686.
38. Vernon Lushington to Jane Lushington, December 17, 1865. SHC 7854/3/5/2/23.
In his masterly survey of England during Queen Victoria’s long reign, the historian G. M. Young concluded, “Of all the decades
